"Living fossils" have survived the ages, ancient relics that are still evolving.
To have made it to our time, they would have escaped the climatic changes, mass extinctions and other major ecological crises that have rocked the natural history of our planet! Known as living fossils or pan-chronic species, these micro-organisms, plants and animals are like relics straight from the depths of time.
Take, for example, sphenodons, the only contemporary representatives of a group of reptiles that flourished in the Jurassic period; or nautiluses, the only present-day cephalopods to have a true external shell, even though legions of them populated the oceans in the Secondary Era; or coelacanths, fish that were supposed to have disappeared at the same time as the dinosaurs until a very wriggly specimen was caught in 1938 off the coast of South Africa...
Although these creatures appear to have remained unchanged since ancient times, the laws of evolution apply to them as they do to all forms of life: no species can perpetuate itself identically for hundreds of millions of years. Although they have retained archaic characteristics, descended from lineages that were once prosperous but are now almost extinct, our living fossils are in fact pure moderns, sometimes subtly but certainly different from their ancestors frozen in the rock.
